Thoughts That Cure Radically: Haley Mellin/Olivier Mosset Untitled Gallery

Abstraction and representation act as Janus faced mirrors of one another in this two person exhibition of Halley Mellin and Olivier Mosset at Untitled Gallery. Just as the viewer acclimates to one pictorial position than the other sneaks up to lay claim to their attention; in this exhibition something and nothing are double sided helixes of the same aesthetic proposition.

Haley Mellin’s paintings-made with oil, encaustic and ink on specially prepared grounds- are representations of the artifacts of studio labor. A white bucket adjacent a corner of a canvas and a clotted rag hung on a white wall are all that is depicted in Mellin’s painting. Olivier Mosset presents a single round canvas painted white hung next to striking yellow wall. Thing-ness and no-thing-ness speak across to each other with Mellin’s and Mosset’s work. The objects depicted in Mellin’s painting represent studio activity through a depiction of painting paraphernalia while becoming themselves the end results of their studio depictions. Her paintings eschew representation by affixing actual staples to her canvases, creating a synthetic blend of the actual and depicted. The frontal depictions-especially the rag paintings-create shimmering violet and fuchsia fantasies on pale white backgrounds that further breaks down the strict realism her work only seems to operate under. Mosset’s realism is activated by Mellin’s abstraction. While Mellin’s paintings are representations that break down into abstractions, Mosset’s painting builds up from abstraction into an existing presence. Mellin’s wan still lives, the placement next to the yellow wall and the light filled gallery space move Mosset’s painting from an inert art object into a compositional element active in the entire field of the viewer’s attention.

Olivier Mosset has exhibited his work in pairings before (including the combination of his paintings with the tricked out motorcycles fashioned by Indiana Larry at Spencer Brownstone in 2007). Contrasting his own mute work with another’s allows inferred tributaries to flow into the mind of the viewer, as happens in this small exhibition. Haley Mellin and Olivier Mosset are more than a generation apart (he born in Bern, Switzerland in 1944 and she in San Francisco, California in 1981). The exhibition represents not so much a passed on tradition or even a shared manner but instead a parallel respect for silence. Haley Mellin shares the same genetic DNA as the metaphysical Spanish still life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan, who became a Carthusian monk later in life and saw the everyday objects of cabbage, melon and quince as sacred objects of contemplation. Cotan’s still lives call the viewer to silent attention to the world around them as imbued with the glory of the Divine. Haley Mellin concentrates her own work with the same patience and perception as the 17^th century Spaniard but uses the studio as a metaphor for her act of silent devotion. That her work can have an affinity with Mosset’s-who has questioned the validity of painting through a continuance of painting-is demonstrated in this exhibition.